The present invention may be used to particular advantage for bottling beer, or other beverages sensitive to oxygen in glass bottles, which the following description will refer to, although this is in no way intended to limit the scope of protection as defined by the accompanying claims.
In the bottling of carbonated liquid or liquid sensitive to oxygen, like beer in glass bottles, a system is known comprising a feed line for feeding a succession of empty bottles to a filling machine, in turn comprising a filling wheel, which is mounted to rotate continuously about a longitudinal axis, receives the empty bottles successively, feeds pressurized gas into the bottles, fills the bottles with beer, decompresses the full bottles, and feeds the bottles to a capping machine connected to the filling machine by at least one transfer wheel, and which closes the bottles with respective caps.
Though widely used, known bottling systems of the above type have various drawbacks.
In particular, because the liquid in the bottles comes into contact with the atmosphere, and therefore with oxygen, as the bottles are transferred from the filling machine to the capping machine, known bottling systems of the above type, to prevent oxidation and deterioration of the liquid, have the drawback of having to remove the air from the bottles by skimming the liquid before the bottles are capped, thus resulting in loss of a certain amount of liquid from each bottle. This is particularly damaging in the case of beer, which is highly oxygen-sensitive.
Moreover, comprising two machines, i.e. the filling machine and the capping machine, systems of the above type are fairly bulky, and allow little freedom of choice in terms of layout.